Marketing Strategy

You’re scrolling, and there it is again: a competitor’s post. Bright photos, a glowing review, a product launch that looks like it went off without a hitch. That tight knot shows up in your stomach before you’ve even finished reading the caption. Why isn’t that me? That’s the comparison trap: watching someone else’s win and quietly mistaking it for proof of your own loss. I’ve felt that exact knot plenty of times myself. What changed things for me wasn’t pretending the feeling wasn’t there. It was noticing what I actually did with it once it showed up. For a while,…

You’re an overachiever. You’ve built something real, and you didn’t get here by winging it. So the idea of trying something new and having it flop in public feels less like a risk and more like a threat to the whole identity you’ve built. I get that completely. And I still think perfectionism is the thing quietly costing you the most clients. Here’s what nobody tells overachievers: the version of you that gets it wrong in public is the same version that eventually gets it right, just a few drafts sooner than she otherwise would have. Skip the wrong, messy,…

You post. You run the occasional promotion, and you started a blog last spring that’s still going, mostly. On paper, you’re doing the marketing. So why does it still feel like nothing adds up to anything? Here’s a hard question worth asking honestly. Is any of that a strategy? Or is it a list of marketing strategies that don’t work? None of them were ever connected to a plan in the first place. For most small business owners, it’s the second one. That’s not a discipline problem. It’s a definitions problem. Strategy and tactics aren’t the same word wearing two…

A friend of mine, someone I think of as a total powerhouse in her field, texted me about a huge opportunity she’d just been offered. A real nomination, the kind most people would frame and hang on the wall. Her first instinct was to turn it down. “I’ll thank them for the nomination but I’ll politely decline,” she wrote. When I asked why, she said her business didn’t make “enough money” to deserve it. This is a woman making real changes in her field, inspiring other people, and she was ready to talk herself out of a room because of…

You’ve got a notebook full of marketing advice. A tip from a podcast here, a framework from a course there, and a screenshot of someone else’s Reels strategy, saved for whenever you get around to it. Read enough of it and it starts to feel like you have too many marketing strategies and somehow nothing to show for any of them. That’s not a discipline problem. It’s a collecting problem. Six tips pulled from six different sources were never going to add up to one plan. None of them were built with your specific business in mind. Each one was…

You’ve got a good business. You solve a real problem for real people. And somehow, the people who need exactly what you offer never find you. Maybe you’ve typed “how do I get more people to know about my business” into Google at the end of a long day. The answer usually isn’t more marketing. It’s a message problem. The words you use to describe what you do aren’t the words your customers use to describe what they need. That mismatch is why you stay invisible. It’s fixable, but it starts with your language, not your ad budget. How Do…

Most advice about entrepreneurship keeps repeating the same five ideas. After twelve years reading, testing, and running my own business, I think four of them are wrong. This isn’t a neutral list of tips. It’s entrepreneurship advice that goes against what almost everyone in your feed is telling you, and I stand behind every line of it. I used to agree with these too. Then I kept running into business owners who did everything “right” by the popular version of these rules. They still felt stuck. So here are the five opinions. That’s why I’ve landed on the opposite side…

Most buyer persona development starts with a worksheet. Age, income, favourite podcast, three hobbies, a stock photo of a woman smiling at a laptop. You fill it out, feel official for about ten minutes, and then write your website copy exactly the way you would have written it anyway. Here’s what actually changes your writing: picture one real person while you type, not a demographic, not “women aged 35 to 54 who value quality.” One woman, with a name you gave her, sitting across the table while you write the sentence. That’s the whole skill. It sounds too small to…

Marketing feels overwhelming right around the moment your holiday to-do list hits seven items. Plan early, get mobile-friendly, nail the offer, run ads, send emails, prep for a rush of orders, stay on-brand. Read that list once and you already feel behind, and the season hasn’t even started. Here’s the part nobody puts on the checklist: you don’t need to do all seven things well. You need one clear offer, said the same way everywhere. That’s what makes it obvious why someone should buy from you this season instead of scrolling past. Everything else on that list only works once…

A campaign flops badly and the first thing that shows up isn’t a plan. It’s a feeling: maybe you’re just not cut out for this. I think that feeling lies to you more than any bad ad ever could. One failed launch is information. It’s never a verdict on whether you can do this. Here’s the trap I see most often when someone’s trying to bounce back from a failed marketing strategy: they panic-switch. The Facebook ads didn’t work, so they try Instagram. That doesn’t work fast enough, so they try email. Nothing gets enough time to actually prove itself…

Every list of small business marketing mistakes reads the same way: post more, spend more, hustle harder. That advice keeps circulating because it sounds like effort is the fix. Most of the time, it isn’t. The damage usually happens earlier, in a handful of choices that get skipped. They feel less urgent than posting today’s update. Fix those, and the tactics you’re already using start pulling their weight instead of disappearing into the feed. None of the three below need a bigger budget. They need about twenty honest minutes and a willingness to look at what’s actually happening, not what…

You don’t have five thousand dollars sitting around for ads. Five hundred might be a stretch too. Marketing with little money is still marketing, and neither number is a reason to sit still and wait for a bigger budget before you promote your business. Most businesses put somewhere between 8 and 12 percent of revenue toward marketing. That’s what HubSpot’s research on marketing budgets found. If you’re running a small service business on tight margins, that number probably feels like a joke right now. It doesn’t have to be your number. Look past the spreadsheet full of ad quotes for…

Marketing is usually the first thing that slips when a business gets busy. Orders and clients take over. The actual work of running things swallows whatever time is left, and the marketing calendar sits untouched for weeks. That gap costs more than it looks like it does in the moment. Here’s how to keep marketing moving without needing more hours in the day. Get honest about your real priorities If you’ve got a launch coming, a course, a webinar, whatever it is, your marketing time should go there first. Figure out exactly what needs to exist: the social posts, the…

Standing out in a crowded market doesn’t mean being louder or cheaper than the business next door. That stuff wears off fast. What actually sticks is a clear point of view, something a bigger competitor can’t just copy. According to PwC’s 2025 Customer Experience Survey, 52% of people stopped buying from a brand after one bad experience. That’s a big number. It also means the businesses getting the experience right are picking up customers everyone else is losing. Here’s what helps, once you get past the advice you’ve probably already heard. Know your audience well enough to get specific Vague…

Setting your prices can feel like guessing in the dark. Go too high and you worry people will walk away. Come in too low and you end up working twice as hard for half the money. A little strategy takes the guesswork out of it. I want to say this up front: charging enough to run a healthy business isn’t something to feel bad about. It’s just the math. With that in mind, here’s how I think about picking an approach and sticking with it. Cost-based pricing: know your number first Cost-based pricing is the simplest of the three approaches…

Most marketing advice about your target audience starts with age ranges and income brackets. Fill in the blanks and you’re supposed to understand the person you’re selling to. In real life, a stack of demographic data rarely tells you what to actually say to them. The businesses that connect fastest with their audience aren’t the ones with the most data. They’re the ones who know the exact words their customers use to describe their own problems. That’s a different skill than pulling a report, and it’s the one most guides skip. Here’s where to actually find those words. Why demographics…

The word funnel gets thrown around so much in marketing that it’s starting to lose meaning. Course creators sell templates for them and software companies sell tools to build them. Somewhere in all that noise, the useful idea at the centre got buried. A sales funnel is the path a person travels from hearing about your business for the first time to becoming a paying client. You already have one, whether you designed it or not. Every client you’ve ever worked with took some route to get to you. The question is whether that route was built on purpose or…

A lot of service business owners only make money one way. A client books time, does the work, sends the invoice. When that’s the whole model, a slow month hits your whole income at once. Additional income streams for small business owners don’t have to mean building a second company. Usually the fastest one is something you already know how to do, packaged a different way. Here’s where to start looking, and how to add income without stretching yourself thin or losing focus on the clients you already have. None of this needs to happen overnight. A second income stream…

Most small businesses don’t have a marketing strategy. They have a pile of tactics picked up from wherever sounded convincing that week, a podcast episode here, a course that never got finished there. A real marketing strategy for small business means choosing a few things on purpose and doing them well. It beats trying every platform and every trend at once. Here are five places to put your attention first. No overhaul required, just one change at a time. None of these five things need a bigger budget or a new hire. Just a bit of focus, one piece at…